Applications such as word processing applications, spreadsheet applications, electronic slide presentation applications, and the like, may display contextual messages relative to the applications. For example, when a user launches an application, the application may display a message welcoming the user to the application. Each individual application implements a rich canvas for displaying such messages. Furthermore, each individual application manages the content of such messages including retrieving contextual messages from a server, storing contextual messages, and rendering contextual messages. In this regard, in order to display a new and/or updated contextual message within an application, the application has to be updated with new software. In turn, current techniques for displaying contextual messages within an application may be slow, inefficient, time consuming and expensive.